Sforno on Genesis 1:26/ספורנו על בראשית א׳:כ״ו

1ויאמר אלוקים נעשה, at this point G’d endowed His entourage to carry out the task assigned to it.

2אדם, another one of the species referred to as נפש חיה, one known as אדם. This is why we read in Genesis 2,7 ויהי האדם לנפש חיה, “Adam became one of the species known as נפש חיה.”

3בצלמנו, a species designed to live forever seeing that it is predominantly intellectual. By doing this, G’d provided an opening by means of His Torah to acquire an understanding of the nature of purely spiritual, disembodied beings such as angels. Our soul has been given the key to understand something about the nature of such beings.

4כדמותנו, acting intelligently like the angels, though from free choice, not like the angels who act under Divine compulsion. In this respect, though the angels are celestial beings, they do not resemble man. In this respect man is a little more like G’d Himself than are the angels, though our habitat is in the “lower” regions of the universe. The principal difference between G’d’s total freedom of action and that of man’s is that G’d’s freedom of action is always put to a constructive use, whereas man frequently abuses his G’d given freedom to oppose the expressed will of His Creator. At any rate, not being hampered by the limitations imposed by having a body, the qualitative freedom of G’d is far superior to that of man, and this is why the Torah uses the comparative כדמותנו, to show that the comparison is limited.